Depending on their national characteristics, keyboards use different Meta keys such as the Shift, Ctrl, Alt and Alt-Gr key to output different characters which are assigned to a second key occupied by more than one character. The respective Meta key and the respective second key are depressed at the same time to obtain such characters. A character in this context is taken to mean all characters to which a character code is assigned. Characters in what is known as the ASCII (American Standard Code for information Interchange) code are for example characters such as “a”, “B”, “+”, “_”, but also non-visible characters such as the character which is assigned to a delete key for example.